Takaya Imamura, an artist who worked with Shigeru Miyamoto to create iconic Nintendo games Star Fox, F-Zero, and The legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, is retiring today.
Imamura has worked for Nintendo for 32 years and is also famous for creating Zelda map dealer Tingle, who has made several appearances in this series and other games in the past two decades.
最終 出 社日 空 っ っ ぽ の 会 社 と 自 撮 り (T ^ T) も う こ こ に 入 る こ と と が 無 い と 思 う と や は り 寂 し い ‥ 32 年 間 お 疲 れ俺！
Posted by Takaya Imamura on Tuesday, January 19, 2021
(His message, according to a Kotaku translation, says, “This is my last day at work. I took a selfie with the office empty. I don’t think I’ll be back here again. As you expected, I’ll miss it.”)
Imamura joined Nintendo in 1989 when work was already underway in F-Zero, a Super NES racing game released in 1990. “After I joined, Miyamoto gathered some of the new employees and said that we would work on the new system,” recalled Imamura in a 2017 interview. “Even now, I clearly remember how this made me happy.”
F-Zero it was originally designed as a wheeled racing car, but portraying tires in motion on the vehicle added significantly more frames to Imamura’s animations. Imamura said the team of nine developers simply decided to “lose the tires and leave the drivers hovering”, completing the game’s futuristic appeal.
Imamura was also an artist for the development team Star Fox, the 1993 Super Nintendo game that was the company’s first to use polygonal graphics. Imamura drew the characters, making them anthropomorphic animals under Miyamoto’s guidance. From there, Imamura modeled the faces of the characters on his colleagues, with protagonist Fox McCloud following Miyamoto and winger Falco as Tsuyoshi Watanabe. (In a 2017 interview, Imamura revealed that Peppy is director Katsuya Eguchi, and Slippy Toad is the longtime Zelda developer, Yoichi Yamada.)
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The most enduring character that Imamura designed and rendered, however, is Tingle. Appearing for the first time in Majora mask on the Nintendo 64 in 2000, Tingle’s bizarre image and behavior made him a favorite of comedy relief among fans. He came back in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and appeared in several other games, including four of the five Super Smash Bros. (all except the first) and 2014’s Hyrule Warriors. Tingle also starred in a series of Nintendo DS games: Freshly harvested Rosy Rupeeland from Tingle, Tingle’s Balloon Fight DS, and Matured love balloon trip.